


Who Are You?

by mihrsuri



Category: Pundit & Broadcast Journalist RPF (US)
Genre: Biracial Character, Ficlet, Gen, Id Fic, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Racism, feelings about being biracial, the way microaggressions work :/
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 06:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10735647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mihrsuri/pseuds/mihrsuri
Summary: Richard & Identity.





	Who Are You?

**Author's Note:**

> I’m biracial - the product of a Persian/Syrian Jewish father who was born and grew up in England and a white Australian mother. This is purely purely id fic born out of things that have been said to me and my various feelings about the things that have been through a ficlet.

What Richard knows is that when his mother came to England, she tries as hard as she can to be the proper English, well, everything. His father would say, not quite joking that perhaps it was better if she gave him sandwiches instead of flatbread and hommus, if she didn’t sing him songs or read him books in Arabic because he’d never fit in that way. 

Some days he’d study himself in the mirror and try to work out whether he looked white, looked coloured or looked both. It tended to change, depending on the day. Depending on the person or the place he was in or whether or not he feels like answering the thousand and one questions that come when people really look at him. 

Now as an adult he’s gone to Moroccan restuarants, started to learn Arabic and he feels something like an impostor - as much as he does in the other world, the English world. Not England as such - though Oxford was a challenge. Oxford, where a friend remarked that he looked white, so it doesn’t matter much anyway.

“You’ve never had to deal with racism, I’d say” the friend says over beer and chips and Richard finds himself trying not to cry. Or hit something. He thinks of being asked ‘where are you from really? No really?” when he’d said Birmingham The endless ‘no, I was born here’ to the questions about the accent he seems to have picked up. The people who asked where he’d picked up his tan and then edge away when they realise it’s permanent. 

Sometimes that hurts worse than the dog breed or ‘mixed’ remarks, the comments from friends. 

Years later he’s married, a father, a commentator and somehow he can still feel like the boy who wasn’t allowed to take hummus to school and whose teacher was determined to believe he was dirty and then complimented him on being ‘such a well behaved little boy, for his background’ to another teacher or the friend who decided he was a liar for saying he wasn’t white. 

And that’s why he doesn’t say anything to Keith, when Keith hurts him


End file.
